Infographic: Charting the rise of mobile payments

Whilst in hindsight 2015 was by no means “the year of Apple Pay” that Tim Cook predicted, it was certainly the year of mobile payments – in the sense that’s when the technology got more traction. Apple Pay had notched its first full calendar year on the market and Samsung and Google both started rolling out its own Pays.

In 2014 there were only seven banks that offered services that worked with mobile payments, now Forbes says there are 55. Apple Pay alone added 20 new US banks this month and finally broke into (properly) Australia. The company also revealed that it is adding one million users to the payment service.

Samsung Pay followed Apple into China and is also diversifying its services by introducing a rewards platform – an area that is getting more and more interest from payments companies.

This infographic from Forbes, with the research conducted by Juniper Research, shows that the rise of mobile and wearable payments started slowly but is growing exponentially.

Apple is clearly the battering ram, breaking down resistance and paving the way for smaller or different companies to make the most of the new infrastructures that come with Apple Pay. Even Samsung is second in that sense, but that may soon change given the drop in iPhone sales and more importantly the fact that Samsung Pay actually works with the older magnetic stripe card terminals.